Chapter 7: Breath of Life

  July 31, 20XX. That day would mark the beginning of another mass extinction, similar to the one sixty-five million years ago—probably the most famous, ending the era of the dinosaurs—or the one two hundred and fifty million years ago, the most impactful, also known as the "Great Dying," which claimed 90% of marine life and 75% of terrestrial vertebrate species at the time. Another notable event occurred four hundred and forty-four million years ago, at the end of the Ordovician period, which is the oldest known mass extinction to date. In all of Earth's known history, there have been five events that hold the title of mass extinction. This event can be called the sixth mass extinction.

  It happened without warning. Although our era’s technology is capable of predicting the weather a month in advance or detecting minute changes in the chemistry of our environment, we could not prepare for the unexpected shower of light that ended our civilization.

  Don’t get me wrong—our current technology would have no problem tracking random asteroids or comets. Hell, we can even observe cataclysmic events from billions of light-years away. But this one was just an incredibly unexpected, almost unnatural event. The rain of light was too fast to be warned about, too bright to be seen, and too vast to avoid.

  During a day like billions of others—people smiling, enjoying life, spending time with family, drinking at the bar, working in the office, or getting tossed around by life, fighting over absurd reasons, crying alone in a room, hiding their scars and bruises from their loved ones, mourning the loss of someone, or just entertaining the idea of ending it all.

  Ironically, it was the last ones who won the lucky bet that day. Because without any warning, it all ended. No more screams from the children, no more cries from the lone mother, no more debt for the struggling father, no more pain for those who left, no more fights. No more, for there is nothing left. After millions of years of suffering, for a moment, there was universal peace.

  For a few brief instants after the end, the world was still. The light was blinding, and the silence was deafening. A world of brightness and silence, like some fictional version of heaven, unfolded, yet it will remain forever unseen. When the light finally faded away, only then did the world emerge from that unnatural sanctity.

  The world was on fire. Quite literally, this time. Buildings were falling apart, some structures were melting, streams of water were rising and mixing with the smoke of the burning world.

  As if to add insult to injury, nuclear plants across the globe—including the newly introduced fusion reactor power plants—started to overheat one after another, with the cooling systems failing to prevent a second world-ending disaster.

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  The aftermath of these two cataclysms triggered a chain reaction that caused the eruption of almost all significant active volcanoes in the world. In just a few hours, the world reached a peak in temperature that was only second to the birth of the Earth.

  With wildfires raging on every continent and volcanoes spewing lava and smoke, adding to the massive amounts of water vapor ascending to the sky, the world soon turned dark. Shielded from the sun by a dark cloud made of water and smoke, absorbing all the light, it would be impossible to describe the scene except as hell.

  The fires raged for days, and in some places, weeks, but with the constant darkness, the concept of days and nights became obsolete. During this time, all the ice on the mountains, Antarctica, and the North Pole melted away, diluting the salinity of the oceans and causing the death of the plankton that had been spared from the previous world-ending event. Their loss broke the last strand that held together the food chain of the few surviving aquatic species that lived deep enough to ignore the pain from above.

  The melting of the ice also provoked floods and a rise in ocean levels, but at least it helped cool the world. Which, in fact, was not good news, because with the heat sealed inside by the atmosphere, and the cool air from below, combined with the great amount of humidity in the air, tornadoes and hurricanes of disproportionate size struck in some parts of the world, while in other areas, violent dry winds blew ashes away, creating a deadly black ash tempest.

  When the fires finally died down, and natural evaporation began to cool the heat, the world faced another death-bringer: the cold. Of course, the process wasn’t uniform; some places cooled faster than others, but with the world turned into a wasteland, it was hard to retain heat in any form.

  A few weeks after the end, the world met the dreaded endless winter.

  Miraculously, life didn’t disappear. Perhaps by luck or pure adaptability, some survivors emerged. Most of them were small bugs or lizards, too small to be affected by the end of the giants, or weed species accustomed to surviving wildfires and windy weather. Any species larger than a cat would find it difficult to sustain itself with the lack of food and shelter. Still, some lucky—or unlucky—ones managed to witness the end of their species. Humans included.

  ……………………………

  In the deepest part of Earth, in a place that could be called the core of our planet, something awakened. Maybe under the nourishment of countless souls that it had inadvertently consumed since the dawn of life, or the plight of nine billion human souls who claimed to have died unjustly, the oldest being in our world was finally born.

  It had existed since the first bacteria began to multiply, witnessed the formation of the first multicellular beings, and the development of sentient beings. For hundreds of millions of years, it had been there, yet never truly existed, for it was but a concept. Born from the will of countless beings to survive, at the sixth threat to its concept, it was finally born into being. For the first time in existence, it was alive, and its will was to survive. For that to happen, it needed others to live. So it did the most natural thing for any living being: it breathed, and from that breath came something new—something never seen before. It was life force seeping from the Earth’s core to the surface, shining in a beautiful red, bringing vitality to a dying world.